Tag Archives: Irão

“Contentions Iran Knows More About Syria Than Obama” de Jonathan S. Tobin (Commentary)

Unlike Westerners who simply took it for granted that Assad must go, Ayatollah Khamenei and Vladimir Putin have remembered an ironclad rule of history: tyrants fall when they lose their taste for spilling their people’s blood, not when they loosen the reins.

“If Iran [makes] an official declaration to close the Strait of Hormuz, then [it will be] committing political and military suicide. The Iranians will not know what hit them. We all know what happened to Jamal Abdul Nasser when he closed the Strait of Tiran in 1967.

“Iran doesn’t have the military capability to close the strait. About three years after the 1988 battle with the Iranians, the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Nimitz was launching F-14, F-18 and E-2 aircraft day and night while patrolling the Arabian Gulf… The Iranians knew about what the USS Nimitz could do. [So] later they decided to use a safer approach to defend the Iranian shores. They installed Silkworm Anti-Ship Missiles. But later on they realized they [couldn’t] protect these missiles. They remembered what happened to the Syrians when they [deployed] missiles in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon without air superiority.

“The Iranians have neither sophisticated torpedoes [nor] sophisticated surface-to-air missiles, and they have no airborne radar (AWACS) capability. As for their outdated diesel submarines, the Iranians are not well trained for sophisticated underwater operations, and their submarines have very limited capabilities. And the Iranian’s [greatest] military weakness is that they don’t have an air force. The Iranian high-tech planes – the F-14 (Tomcat) and F-4 (Phantom) – are very old, and their radar system… is inoperative due to age and lack of maintenance and spare parts. Their pilots are always operating in the dark because they have no command or control. The only strength the Iranian have is the land forces. They could [deploy] hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But these forces will be useless for sea battles… and have no air support.

“World leaders had expected a conciliatory proposal to defuse the nuclear crisis after Teheran had restarted another part of its nuclear programme in August. Instead, they heard the president speak in apocalyptic terms of Iran struggling against an evil West that sought to promote “state terrorism”, impose “the logic of the dark ages” and divide the world into “light and dark countries”. The speech ended with the messianic appeal to God to “hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace”.

(…) Western officials said the real reason for any open-eyed stares from delegates was that “they couldn’t believe what they were hearing from Ahmadinejad”. Their sneaking suspicion is that Iran’s president actually relishes a clash with the West in the conviction that it would rekindle the spirit of the Islamic revolution and – who knows – speed up the arrival of the Hidden Imam

Russian nuclear scientists are providing technical assistance to Iran’s attempts activate the country’s first nuclear power plant at the Gulf port.

But they have raised serious concerns about the extensive damage caused to the plant’s computer systems by the mysterious Stuxnet virus, which was discovered last year and is widely believed to have been the result of a sophisticated joint US-Israeli cyber attack.(…)

Russian scientists working at the plant have become so concerned by Iran’s apparent disregard for nuclear safety issues that they have lobbied the Kremlin directly to postpone activation until at least the end of the year, so that a proper assessment can be made of the damage caused to its computer operations by Stuxnet.

The Iranian government is bitterly opposed to any further delay, which it would regard as another blow to national pride on a project that is more than a decade behind schedule. While Western intelligence officials believe Iran’s nuclear programme is aimed at producing nuclear weapons, Iran insists the project’s goals are peaceful.

The Russian scientists’ report to the Kremlin, a copy of which has been seen by The Daily Telegraph, concludes that, despite “performing simple, basic tests” on the Bushehr reactor, the Russian team “cannot guarantee safe activation of the reactor”.

Iran is planning to place medium-range missiles on Venezuelan soil, based on western information sources, according to an article in the German daily, Die Welt, of November 25, 2010. According to the article, an agreement between the two countries was signed during the last visit o Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Tehran on October19, 2010. The previously undisclosed contract provides for the establishment of a jointly operated military base in Venezuela, and the joint development of ground-to-ground missiles.